The lack of curative/dispel magics for tactical. This may seem pointless, but I think it would add the ability to further make poisons/diseases more potent but leave a way to remove them through abilities/magic.

- The Immersion - I feel much more drawn to distinctively different factions with strong lore behind them and a world that feels a little more "alive" and brimming with environmental uniqueness.

- THE BUGS AND THE ENGINE. I hate that there are bugs and weird AI behavior that existed in early FE builds that still exists today.

- The lack of hard choices with the civilization aspect of the game. Reduce the amount of room I have or force me to make other difficult and unique choices. See Warlock 2 for *some* inspiration. Maybe even Endless Legend, it looks like.

I do not like how the game is tiny in scale, it hurts the immersion. Its great to start building your empire from ashes with few people, but in the late game, it always looks bit funny to see "epic battles of empires" with 20 soldiers involved. I am not asking for total war style 10k battles, but having bigger units in our disposal would be great. Or at least make them LOOK more epic, like the 9 soldiers squad from the original EWOM.

Aside from that, music could use a refresh and research is a bit bland.

Also the whole unrest/taxes model is a bit oversimplified to my taste. It would be great when the rebelious cities did more than just have 0 production. E.g. spawning bandits in the city domain would be great (AoW3 model).

- The lack of hard choices with the civilization aspect of the game. Reduce the amount of room I have or force me to make other difficult and unique choices. See Warlock 2 for *some* inspiration. Maybe even Endless Legend, it looks like.

I think I will agree with this. I did not feel that "Critical decision" aspect when I played LH. Researching techs, building cities felt like more of the same. It did not feel like my decisions on that regard mattered all that much in the grand scheme of things. Like what stuff I researched first was not so critical. I could build just about anything In my cities etc.

The game focus was more on "building your uber party ". Leveling your heroes and clearing the land around you was fun but I missed that hard economic management and strategic choices I find In my favourite 4X.

I am currently playing Age of Wonder III and I think they managed this better than LH, despite the game being simpler than LH.

You have money, research, mana and army as your main ressources and you are constantly struggling to balance them properly.

-Build too much military and you chocke your income and halt your growth.

-Neglect research and you quickly fall behind.

-Dont build enough military and you cannot clear the land for more bonuses and expension room.

-Dont have enough mana generation, you cant use those awesome techs you just researched.

You are always wondering what would be the best "build". In LH i never really needed a build.

IMO, there is something about the Mid-Late game challenge that is very lacking about LH and increasing the difficulty simply isn't the solution as doing so also increases the early game difficulty, which I think scales quite well. So, it's more involved as you transition through a game from early to mid-late. I think several factors contribute:

While minor, the game could use more mid-late game content (quests, events, units, spells, loot, unique monsters, etc), partly for the replay-ability aspect, but also to keep the player on his/her toes by not quite being able to prepare for everything that the game should be dishing out.

The game could really use another dynamic introduced in the mid-late game. I've mentioned it before in other threads but having Wildlands increase in size as the game progresses, and thus become more threatening in both quantity (number of monsters) and quality (strength of monsters), would add additional pressure on to the player and AI. As the AI becomes a cakewalk anyways by late game, having them replaced by something stronger should be a boon to gameplay.

The AI. Most of the AI don't amount to much in this game and I think it has everything to do with the number of queues they have available to them by the mid game. Imo, EVERY AI should be aggressively expanding from turn 75-150. This gives the player some time from turn 0-75 to settle into the game, beat off the early game monsters, and grab hold of some territory. However, once turn 75 comes around the AI should want to take over the world. Some do it through war. Some do it through expansion. Some do it through magic, some do it through diplomatic takeover. But they all need to have 3-4 cities at a minimum in order to be able to accomplish there task.

While I simply LOVE the multi-tile city development...being able to construct any building in your cities completely simplifies mid-late game difficultly as you can detail glass-cannon cities for your empire, focusing on specific elements you require. Whether a maintenance upkeep is introduced or limited number of building 'slots' are made available, there needs to be some active element to deter the player from going all out in city design. Selecting a building for your city should be a high-stakes decision with far-reaching consequences into your economy. Destroying buildings has been bugged from day 1 and should also play an important role in the game as your change your delivery strategy and need to construct different buildings....again, whether that be to help offset increased upkeep costs or whether it is because you've reached your building limit.

Here is a list of things that I find really annoying about the game are:

The AI does not EVER upgrade outposts.

Simply put, the Master Quest needs a lot of work:

The Master Quest is WAY too easy. (IMO, the Dragon's Eye Quest is much more suited to being the Master Quest)

The Master Quest includes a Wildland in its design. (Takes up unwanted space on the map) At the very least, this should be some kind of spell effect like Curgen's Volcano in which the Pit of Lost Souls rises out of the ground at some unknown location on the map. Now that would be EPIC.

If the Master Quest is disabled, the Wildand portion should NOT appear on the map still.

The Capital City concept is fictitious at best and there should be a spell/building to move the capital designation to a new city.

The 'non-continuous' unrest penalty would change, obviously dependent on ZoC.

If a 1/faction building represented the capital (perhaps a 'Palace'), it could have inherent bonus (perhaps the non-continuous effect).

Changing the location of your capital would cost production time, resources, and perhaps even mana.

Upon completion of the new capital building, the old building would NEED to be destroyed and all effects negated.

Heroes should be recruited at your capital city location. (NOT at your sovereign's location)

Specialized cities (town, conclave, and fortress) should have specialized city defenders.

The size of wildlands should be dependent on the map size.

The outpost Consulate upgrade is too powerful.

When finding loot, the corresponding pop-up should be a 3-button set of options. (USE to consume or equip an item immediately, EQUIP to open the Equip window to make an informed decision, and OK to exit and carry on)

The fact that a sovereign is a badass in concept - but a weakling in practice.

This is probably the single most frustrating loss from the original concept - I start an empire! ooh, rusted chain mail! Luckily this can be cheated around with modding game files, unfortunately due to it not being a core concept it is a cheat and not a game feature. There should be multiple starting scenarios:

Broken sov - barely enough power to start a civilization, starts at ground zero. Current

Tie it into game difficulty - but assign them to all sovereigns across the board rather than needing to do via files. Would want to consider a research boost, capital city boost as well - i.e. X # of research points per setting and Y amount of base production for capital city to simulate an expedited start.

Either jack up the world to make it comparable in difficulty - or don't. These sovereigns can be demigods. It will trivialize quite a bit, but at the same time you can only be in so many places at once.

To hearken back to the old days - possibly give huge city and empire bonuses if the sov is in residence to compel the user to use them as an administrator.

Interesting concepts for the above:

Weaken the SOV over time (the old essence concept), start big, but get progressively weaker over time - i.e. Max HP reduces by X per turn regardless of level

introduce huge impact events/mobs based upon starting strength - i.e. a flight of dragons lands in your domain, only the Sov can stop them - takes permanent damage - either lose hp, defense or attack - ideally make it decision based.

introduce a Sov 'reckoning' where all Sov meet up every 50 turns to do battle - losers get injuries, which can add up to weaken over time.

Most of this seems do-able via mods, so could be DLC

Beyond that:

I HATE how monsters and AI get along

I HATE arbitrary diplomacy

I HATE AI research trading points (always 20-50 times higher than the player).

I dislike how the AI can't handle a stack or unit of doom. Understood that this is part of the human advantage in planning though.

I don't really like unit design that much. Could easily be streamlined by providing a default troop list and then augmenting with faction specific units or concepts. i.e. all 'wraith' are dodgy. All Gilden are armored, etc. Tie in 2 or 3 concepts per faction that can then be extrapolated to new faction design - similar to Sov design.

Starting locations - make it use the elementaldefs - seems to be ignoring. If I want all starting locations to be 5/5/5 then they should be.

Uhh I think it has been like a month since I last played FE:LH cuz I heard about 1.6's monster lair's zoc so I've been waiting patiently.

Okay things I dislike that I still remember is....

Ridiculous Difficulty ok i'm sorry.

Anyways,

- Gilden AI always get themselves killed by spamming guarded strike on me in tactical battles. I felt like I was exploiting the Gilden AI but can't be helped... i didnt want to die.

- Wildlands isn't very threatening.... I once spawned next to Fire elemental lands, and curgen's tomb, plus asag. To my north, south, and east.

No even once the wildlands did try to assimilate my lands into their empire. Well Curgen's tomb is understandable but not the fire /asag.

-And if one of the elemental gods attack your cities, and you opt to battle them tactically then they will kill themselves as their rank/file troops go fight you cuz there's not enough space on map. And AIs love to travel into Squares that you're not allowed to travel into. Especially archers.

Oh oh yeah. War of Anthys Scenario! Vergas just sat back and picked his nose as I killed off his allies one by one. Was a disappointment. I was annoyed off enough to cast ineluctable vision just to find out where the heck Vergas is and what's he doing..... just drinking beer and laughing at his allies.

I haven't seen a single unit from Vergas show up at all. Here's all of them. Camping in his homebase.

Now problem, when occasionally when they invade me in force they tend to put all their armies into a single tile and laugh at me. At first I panic but then I look at falling star and Tornado spells.... Then I tend to calm down quickly as my reinforcements can deal with forcibly spread out stragglers well enough. Because when they invade, they put every single army in a single stack which makes them really easy to kill via spells. I recommend limit armies to one army or five armies per tile?

Because when I invade the AI. My invasion look something like this for example.

My armies don't all sit on one tile to be falling star'd on or Tornado'd to hell and back.

Ok they're not protected against falling star cuz I'm confident that the dying AI don't have enough shards to make it matter. But they are protected against tornado spells by the virtue of putting only one army per tile so that only one army gets smashed across the map. But the AI don't give a shit and put 22 armies in one tile for me to decimate with one spell.

I LIKE THIS PICTURE THE MOST OUT EVERY PICTURE YOU GUYS MADE FOR FE:LH

But.. Battles never feel like the one shown in that painted picture.

X% of the times Kingdoms always smash the empires into the ground very easily.

And then, battles is always a gankfest with one faction with the upperhand as the enemy struggle to respond after being surprised even when the enemy is the one that dow'd on the faction who easily got the upperhand. Oh well at least it's an epic wallpaper.

But occasionally i see a glimmer of it in the AI. Mostly from Vergas.

Is this dude hitting on me?

*coughs.* Anyways I did manage to see his face but it took some work considering that he summons a titan to scratch my face off with....

Also when titans returned to the world. I expected second cataclysm to happen but nope.

Titans get killed by a patrolling warg riders with pikes that i garrisoned various outposts with.

And I couldn't counter-invade titan's homes through the black portal! I was disappointed.

Come on man! U GOT ME HYPED THEN DISAPPOINTED ALL WITHIN THE SPAN OF FIVE MINUTES!

I thought I was gonna totally lose cities and soldiers to titans' armies.

But the end result is that I now think Pariden was a level 1 noob who picked a fight with a level 100 dude and got pwnt with predictable results.

Siege battles really suck in FE:LH

I built walls! Yay! oh wait enemies can get in my walls anyways. Oh that's not all, my militias disappear after one battle!

Fuck that shit about my militias disappearing after one battle while AI's militias never do that. Fuck that. More worse, even if I manage to do incredible job of defending and not lose a single level 1 militia in siege battle they all vanish anyways for 2nd battle! woo-hoo! jerks.

Even more worse, the level 1 village's defenses in tactical battle is exactly the same as level 5 fortress.

Lack of exciting naval combat is a disappointment but after all it wasn't exactly advertised in FE:LH so I won't hold this against you guys at all. After all AOW3 is bad at it too. As it is, Civ series is only turn based game with semi-working naval combat.

Rectangular map is ehhh. Its bit funny to see that all of the known world is a .. rectangle

AIs have no understanding what unrest is and they proceed to drown in it as the result. There needs to be a script if they reach a certain % of unrest, they need to stop all queued projects and set belltowers etc as their next queue to build. If there is something currently being built, let it finish.

Ais is dreadfully useless when it comes to with outposts. It is the normal for me to raze down many many outposts in 2s or 3s when put just one outpost in the same location and gain access to all resources when AI spend 2-3 outposts to do the same. ANd that is only because AIs don't know how to upgrade the outposts. rawr.

If you guys can make AI deal with unrest for once and all then AIs will be way tougher and stronger at last because they will have resources to spend on plate armored troops like me.

Damn, i remember much of FE:LH even when I just took like a one month break..

What do I like the least? This is going to be a long list for a game I like, but that's the way it usually is with games I consider B+ quality. Lesser games I quit over bigger reasons, better games have fewer reasons.

Many of these are game balance related

1) the way Life/Death shards work. It's buggy and hamstrings the game in some areas.

2) overemphasis on best equipment/armor

3) Wish factions got their own traits they could add as a 4th trait to their unit that were custom

4) not a fan of the way mounts work and that they always are a better option

5) lack of variety in hero trees (please port this into FE from your next game)

I like LH a lot but it could be even better with a few changes/additions etc:

1. Unit size is now too small. In the beginning with EWOM the units leveled up to significant group sizes. Now the growth from party to squad, etc adds about 1 figure to the unit for each new technology!. The units should at least look bigger to make the battles immersive.

2. The lack of the spouse and children to build a dynasty. That was a great EWOM mechanic.

3. Lack of minor factions. This really reduces the complexity of the game.

4. The game should not end so soon. Playing on after the game tells me it is over is a bit of a let down. In order to explore the entire game world on a really large map more time is needed. Game length should be an option the player selects every time they start a new game.

5. Truly random loot items are needed: Something like the "+2 ice sword of life stealing". The prefix and suffix are randomly determined from a truly large list of possibilities when the loot is found. This is a bit more like how Diablo type games handle loot. It adds to the fun a lot.

6. The loot found needs to be proportional in general level to the difficulty of the battle. No more rusty iron gloves after defeating a dragon!

7. More creatures to summon and the high level ability to summon more than one.

What I really don't like is the complete lack of depth in tactical battles. No LOS, terrain penalties/bonuses, flanking, morale, "give bonus to adjacent friendly unit" and so on. Stardock have been trying hard to keep the time you spend on battles down to a few minutes at most, and it's hurting because of that.

But it doesn't go well with how combat is handled on the strategic level anyway. Fun fights or difficult fights - I'm there! But most fights just get auto-resolved by me anyway. And really, fighting a whole game just to end it all in a 5-minute "siege" feels pathetic. I'm not spending 50% of a game playing battles, it's more like 5%. It's not a good number to be around, 25% would be better and having important fights fly by is unforgivable either way.

Again, I understand you wanted to keep the tactical battle duration down and keep focus on strategy. I don't think it turned out well, I don't think those were good decisions. I think you missed out on about 1000 interesting unit traits to link strategic progress with the tactical side of things. I think fights can still be quick, even if they are complex. But tactics needs to be more important*.

* This is also an opportunity to make AI more nuanced and difficult. And it would be far more visible than strategic AI gameplay, which (imho) happens 99% behind fog of war anyway.

About the only thing that really ever annoyed me was the limited choices in heroes. Sometimes I may want a specific type, like a governor, but neither of the two choices that pop up are suited to the task. So I end up stuck with another meathead to go around mashing things.

after ~100 hours of play I still don't understand how to set up the game so that it stays fun for more than a few hours.

there are just too many variables:

enemy difficulty

monster difficulty

victory conditions

how I approach the game: many small armies? focus on 1 strong army of heroes? spam cities? conquer AI opponents? ignore the other empires?

how good I am at the game

what faction/heroes I pick

when games take dozens of hours to finish and half the variables are changing from game-to-game (because of patches or different settings or my game knowledge increasing), figuring out how to set these by trial-and-error becomes impractical

i'm the last person to complain about having too many choices... But when the AI doesn't know how to play the game, the player basically has to become a game designer if the goal is to play an actual strategy game instead of something beyond an empire/hero sandbox

so I played the empire/hero sandbox and basically got to the point where I disliked:

progression rate: customizing abilities / gear / armies can be fun, but when you just make the obvious choice and are stuck with it for a long time, it's not so exciting

quests: too predictable / repetitive

tactical battles: not exciting / suspensful enough. not enough strategy in them. once you learn how things work they're mostly determined by unit stats. the game doesn't force you to become better at tactics over time.

games decided by coinflips: increasing monster difficulty to make games exciting is fine, but strong monsters randomly becoming aggressive and walking over my empire before I am anywhere close to being able to fight them is not so fun

I don't like the map, both the world map and the combat maps.. I hate the look of it, it's so square and so bland. I think one of the main problems is that you designed a cool concept of being able to change and mold the land, but it was never really utilized and the cost was some really ugly squares that just don't look like anything. I hate the squares that act like octagons. It's a terrible thing for tactical combat. With a tactical wargame, you should be able to form linear combat, but no matter what formation you create, anyone can be ganged up on. I also that there doesn't seem to be good tactical combat zone of control, or maybe its too much movement in a small space. There just isn't any real tactics in combat. The tactical combat is just really bad.

The fact that the AI doesn't have to do quests. It's really annoying, because even if quests are easy they require a lot of back and forth with the hero stack, but not for the AI. In fact, this is what made me stop playing altogether a year ago. Almost everything that I don't like in the game, I can mod; not that.

I also don't like that the Building Requirement tag for units (for modders) is not working even though we were told, more than a year ago, that it would be fixed "within a week". A lot of cool stuff could be done with that tag.

Faction traits could be more aligned with game lore and more unique, less spreadsheet oriented

Each faction should have its own art style for buildings and equipment, and the environment it spreads. I'm surprised this hasn't vastly improved over the years.

Each faction should have unique buildings (a few for each faction) and techs (not the entire tree) which reflect that factions pros and cons. You did quite well with special units in this regard.

Sovereign customization is weak. You really could only come up with ten talents?

Quests and random events.

Some quests should span an entire game, progressing in difficulty as the sovereign/game progresses

Quests and RE's should involve choices which evolve the quest in different directions and alter the game in a greater variety of ways depending on the choices the player makes

More quests overall. At least double or triple the current amount of quests.

AI (or "Can you imagine a game of Starcraft where the AI player didn't even know some of the most important racial abilities even existed?")

I know Frogboy believes the AI should be "generally smart; specifically stupid," but as the player it's really fucking annoying knowing the game could be so much more interesting, challenging, and enjoyable if the AI enemy just knew how to use some basic ability (eg Arcane Monoliths, Henchmen) that it's completely ignoring. I really feel like each ability (especially faction abilities) should have some AI code associated with it so the computer will at least use them, even semi-competently. Even something as ubiquitous as outpost upgrades are completely ignored by the AI, and it just feels like it's cheating using them as the human player. An unfortunate side effect of this lack of AI attention is that the strategy these abilities are intended to impose upon the game are completely stifled. Sometimes holding on to ideals can get in the way of fun.

Diplomacy

Diplomacy has gotten better with pretty much every patch, but there's still a long way to go with this. Treaties and trading should be presented under one umbrella: the player should be able to trade resources for treaties, etc.